1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and an image processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have been known apparatuses that form an image by the use of, in addition to C, M, Y, and K or other color toners, a toner in a special color. In one known technique (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-212131), a special color toner is used to provide a surface effect such as gloss on a recording medium.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-212131 discloses a printing system for generating clear toner plane data used in a printing machine from clear plane data and gloss control plane data. The clear plane data is data for forming a transparent image. The gloss control plane data is data for designating the type of a surface effect and a region to which the surface effect is to be applied.
However, to generate the clear toner plane data according to the conventional technique, it has been necessary to process two types of planes (two types of pieces of data), the gloss control plane data and the clear plane data. Consequently, in the conventional technique, a memory capacity is consumed or processing speed is dropped when the clear toner plane data is generated. In addition, a user suffers a load when the user makes an operation to integrate the clear toner plane data and the gloss control plane data. Thus, in the conventional technique, the processing load has been large for generation of the clear toner plane data.